Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Britta Erickson, Ph.D. is an independent scholar and curator living in Palo Alto, California. She has curated major exhibitions at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing) and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford (On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West). In 2007 she co-curated the Chengdu Biennial, which focused on ink art, and in 2010 she was a contributing curator for Shanghai: Art of the City (Asian Art Museum, San Francisco). She is currently producing a series of short films about ink painting.

Erickson is on the advisory boards of the Ink Society (Hong Kong) and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (Beijing), as well as the editorial boards of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and ART Asia Pacific. In 2006 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in Beijing on the Chinese contemporary art market.

Publications include three books—The Art of Xu Bing: Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words (Seattle, 2001); On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West (Stanford/Hong Kong, 2004); and China Onward The Estella Collection: Chinese Contemporary Art, 1966-2006 (Humlebæk, 2007)—as well as biographical entries for Grove Art Online (Oxford, 2005) and numerous articles and essays. She is frequently a speaker at international symposia, invited as an authority on issues in contemporary Chinese art practice, collecting, and criticism.